Building a wine cellar is a difficult proposition; you need space, money and time. These are obvious points, but there is one other thing that is less obvious and perhaps the most difficult — knowing which wines to cellar and for how long.

Did you ever see a wine label say “Drink now through 2010″, or “Best cellared for five to fifteen years”? Of course not. I’ve even visited many vineyard websites and have never once seen this mentioned by the producer. For those who aren’t extremely knowledgeable in this area (most of us), the only way to find out whether a wine should be cellared or not is to get lucky with an online review or know somebody who knows.

Why is this? From a marketing / sales standpoint, the percentage of people who purchase wines to cellar must be extremely low, so I can understand why a winery wouldn’t be promoting the fact that a particular wine should be stored, but on the other hand if they are making wine that will be even better in five years, wouldn’t they want people to know this?

One good thing is the emergence of wine sharing sites on the web, such as cellartracker, cork’d and winelog. These sites allow the experts to provide some extra information about wine and help n00bs try to learn more about how to build up a nice collection.

I’ve been using Cellar Tracker because it has a large community of serious oenophiles. Cork’d is a bit more light and fun; I haven’t really played with Wine Log yet.

From this article, via Gino.

It should be a neat tool, but for now there is a few issues. Here’s just one, for today: It told me I needed to install Flash 8 to continue, so I did. One problem — no way to continue!

(click image to enlarge)

Talk to any die-hard college basketball fan about CBS’ coverage of the NCAA Tournament and you’ll hear mostly grumbling about their lack of understanding of what the viewers want. I wonder if they actually do any user research?

- Their choice of which game to show and when to switch between games is generally horrible. Instead of trying to figure out what the people want, why not take NBC’s lead (with the Olympics) and ESPN’s lead with pretty much everything and show all the games on different channels? Viacom owns Spike, BET, and CSTV, all of which would be reasonable options.

If you’re like me, you may spend a lot of iPodding time using the Shuffle Songs feature. It’s a great tool for the lazy man (ahem), and especially nice for car use (where I typically use my iPod) since driving while navigating the screens probably isn’t the best idea. I do, however, have a few suggestions for how to improve this feature.

1) Shuffle Profiles
The biggest frustration that I have is the limited controls over what is included in shuffle. One could probably argue that the whole point of “shuffle” is that the user gives up control of what songs play, but I still believe that creating shuffle “profiles” with different rules would be a great improvement to this feature. This would obviously have to be handled through the iTunes interface (one of the general challenges with the iPod, that so much of the customization is done through a different program). The user could choose from a list of things to include or exclude from the profile, i.e. by artist, genre, keyword, etc.
(I realize that iPod does have such a thing as “Smart Playlists”, but this seems more appropriate for smaller playlist features, thought admittedly I haven’t used it all that much.)

2) Batch Exclude from Shuffle
A user can pretty easily exclude a single song from shuffle, but this needs to be done individually, which makes excluding an entire album or artist to be quite time consuming. If batch updating of (certain) tags is allowed, why not allow batch shuffle exclusion?

3) Jump out of Shuffle into Album/Artist
I typically use the shuffle feature when I don’t have something particular in mind to play; yet it is also quite common that shuffle picks a song by an artist that inspires me to hear more from that artist or album. To do this, however, I have to navigate through the menus to find those songs, which is somewhat annoying, especially while driving. If there was an easy way to jump directly to the artist or album, this would be very helpful.

That’s all for now; I’ll add more ideas if I can think of any.